Sundance Film Festival 2011: The Ledge, The Future, Tyrannosaur

After Martha... the Sundance formula began to kick it. Matthew Chapman's The Ledge (right) promised, on paper, to be an intriguing thriller about a guy (British actor Charlie Hunnam playing American) who is spotted on a high building ledge about to throw himself off. I should have known something was up with this film from the off, because it begins not with this scenario but with a cop, Hollis (Terrence Howard), talking to a doctor in a fertility clinic, where he learns that he is sterile. Trying to reconcile this information with the fact that he has two cute young children, Hollis is called to the scene of the attempted suicide, where the stranger recounts his story in flashback (rather handily, he reveals that he is been forced to jump, and must wait a feature-length 80 minutes before doing so).

The stranger is Gavin, and he explains how the arrival of a young couple, Joe and Shauna (Patrick Wilson and Liv Tyler), in his apartment block has unravelled his life. In flashback, Gavin meets Shauna when she comes for a job at the hotel where he is the (very unlikely) manager. He falls for her, but backs off when he finds out she is married. Shauna's husband is a strict Christian, however, and after Joe has insulted both him and his gay best friend, Gavin vows to get revenge on him by seducing his wife. With a cleaner storyline, this could have worked. Instead, it's an overpoweringly hokey story of love and redemption, punctuated by pages of creaky, philosophical rumination. Everybody has a king-size skeleton in their closet here, the least of them being that Shauna used to be a crackwhore who was once beaten to within an inch of her life by a kinky punter (yeah, right). Wilson comes off the best of the bunch as the tormented, somewhat sympathetic Joe, but by the unexpected but not exactly twist ending it's hard to give much of a tinker's cuss for any of it.

A big pinch of salt would also have been handy for Miranda July's The Future (left). I didn't love her last one, You And Me And Everyone We Know, but it was sweet and charming in places, with some nice, bathetic human comedy. Such moments are in the follow-up too, but I found The Future so arch and self-regarding that it completely lacked almost any accessibility. The story, such as it is, is narrated by a dying cat (!), which is due to be adopted by Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), a daffy California couple who have lived most of their adult lives together. Realising that the cat will dominate their future for up to five more years, by which time they will be 40 (“which is the same as 50”), the pair decide to live life to the full in the month before the cat arrives.

What begins as a harmless exercise in self-advancement soon gets darker, as Sophie embarks on a relationship with a man whose mobile number she finds on the back of a drawing her partner has bought (like You And Me, everyone is connected). Jason, meanwhile, gets the thin end of the script, starting a job with a tree charity and being determined to act on every coincidence or apparent hidden message he spots within the chaos of their lives. As the two grow further apart, the film gets wackier and wackier, and not in a good way. Jason stops time and talks to the moon, while Sophie moves in with her new man, whose daughter digs a hole in the garden and buries herself up to the neck in it. The whole thing reeks of sub-Laurie Anderson performance art, and July's deliberately awful dancing – off which there is a lot – bounced me severely out of the film, and often. Even though July talked a lot in the Q&A after about how long and hard the process had been, I still had the impression it was tossed together with a minimum of forethought and a very weak grasp of the history of surrealism in cinema. That might sound wanky, but throughout The Future, all I could think about was the past and of how the work of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren achieved so much more a full 60 years ago with seeming so self-regarding or self-satisfied.

And so we come to Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur (right), which I'd hoped to see before I left for Park City. The Egyptian is not a great cinema; the screen is pokey and the sound tinny, but it has a great old-world ambience, and it was definitely an experience to see the film with its core cast – Olivia Colman and Peter Mullan – and their director just a few seats away. I'll stress right now that Tyrannosaur is a very, very tough film, and if any readers are sensitive to animal cruelty, for instance, they should be aware that it begins with a harrowing (but not at all graphic) scene in which the alcoholic Joseph (Mullan) takes his betting-day frustrations out on his beloved dog Blue. It's an intense scene but not at all gratuitous: Joseph is that kind of guy; an unemployed widower, he hurts the things and people he loves, spending days in the pub where he growls at his pint and causes trouble with the loudmouth louts that dare to interrupt his drinking sessions.

While he's off his gourd, Joseph staggers into a local charity shop run by mild-mannered Hannah, who, though scared, doesn't call the police but offers instead to pray for him. The incident is the start of an odd-duck friendship; though he tests the Christian, forgiving, middle-class housewife with insults that are custom-made to score the most direct hits, Joseph comes to respect her. But what Joseph doesn't know is that Hannah's life is not the bed of roses he thinks it is. She lives with the sinister James (Eddie Marsan), a text-book wife-beater who drinks and abuses her in scenes of harsh realism, and when James finds out about Joseph he is not happy, not happy at all.

What should be made clear at this point is that this is not a noodling Mike Leigh-style kitchen-sink character drama, and though it shares that naturalistic style, Tyrannosaur is, unexpectedly, a little more allegorical. It's more of a piece with Mullan's own film Neds, in that it's about warriors in the wild, and though the grimness of the story is difficult to take at the beginning, Considine does not take the cheap route to a nihilistic climax in which the hard rain comes and washes everyone away. This is very much a narrative, in which two characters come to a profound and even shocking understanding of each other, and it very much helps that the performances are just so good.

Mullan we know can ace this kind of role effortlessly, and here he goes even further out, jettisoning the natural charm he drew on for My Name Is Joe to create a truly ugly and abrasive character – racist, quick-tempered, with a history and present of violence – who really struggles to deserve an ounce of sympathy. Colman, though, is the standout. Like Kathy Burke in Nil By Mouth, this is a comedy actress proving how far she's prepared to go in the opposite direction, and to call her performance fearless would be an understatement. After the flashy look-at-my-acting turns in The Ledge, Tyrannosaur was a reminder of how well we Brits make this kind of movie. Everyone here is working towards a common goal, therefore, a scene in which Hannah goes out on the lash, unable to face James, doesn't feel at all like a showcase for a performance, it feels like what it is: a real, desperate and heartbreakingly pivotal moment in Hannah's literally miserable existence.

Considine admitted to me after the screening that he hadn't quite figured out all of for himself yet, but he's aware that what he's made is not just another depressing piece of misery porn. As he well knows, its actually an uplifting and thoughtful meditation on judgement, about the presumptions we make about other people's lives. And, in Joseph's case, he is especially surprised to find in Hannah a fellow traveller, another jungle animal whose survival instincts are as ferocious as his own.